Pseudo Golden-Ratio Spiral Imaging with Gradient Acoustic Noise Cancellation: Application to Real-Time MRI of Fluent Speech

Yoon-Chul Kim¹, Nassos Katsamanis¹, Michael Proctor¹, Shrikanth Narayanan¹, Krishna S. Nayak¹

In the context of vocal tract imaging during fluent speech, golden-ratio (GR) spiral imaging has been shown to provide improved depiction of articulators over conventional spiral imaging. However, one drawback of GR imaging is incompatibility with MRI-gradient noise cancellation methods because there is no periodicity in the gradient waveforms. We apply GR spiral view order with fixed number of interleaves (i.e. pseudo GR spiral) to promote periodicity. The proposed method is well-suited to parallel imaging for acceleration thus leading to improved image quality for selection of a small temporal window and also provides adequate sound quality (and/or comparable speech alignment accuracy) compared to the conventional method.